ArtCenter’s Transportation Design Department moves house
By Karl Smith2024-06-17T11:43:00
The storied programme moves into the Mullin Transportation Design Center at the College’s South Campus
For nearly fifty years, Artcenter’s Transportation Design Department was housed in a steel and glass structure perched on a promontory overlooking Pasadena and Los Angeles. But now the program has moved from its lofty heights to a location near downtown Pasadena, closer to the urban heart of the area.
The Mullin Transportation Design Center, as the new facility is called, is inside the shell of the former California Cooperative Wind Tunnel, built during World War II by a consortium of aircraft companies and the nearby California Institute of Technology. The facility was the first supersonic wind tunnel and was the testing place for a generation of both subsonic and supersonic aircraft including the SR-71 “Blackbird” spy plane.
The wind tunnel has long since been replaced and located on the Cal Tech campus. The building shell was bought by philanthropist Peter Mullin two decades ago and used by ArtCenter for classrooms and a very large art gallery, after a dramatic renovation by Los Angeles architects Daly/Genik.
Today the 950 building, as it is commonly called, has been remodeled with